The old internet. What are your memories of it?

Originally posted by EnzoD
and trolling yahoo chatrooms.

haha seems to be a reoccurring thing amongst many people. It was really the best. At one point I had two computers side by side, both with mics, and I'd have my buddies over and we would just harass the hell out of people on there all day. If you went into the Brittany Spears chat room and told them "Brittany sucks!!" it really riled up a bunch of people. And when guys were talking, calling them lady. I always thought that special ed from crank yankers stole that from me, as I was doing it before the show came out. Although, lacking the handicapped sounding voice.

I think if it wasn't for the fun of trolling the internet might have taken off a lot slower. There were like hundreds of thousands of people, it seems, doing nothing but hanging out in chat rooms all day arguing with each other and being ridiculous. Ahh, those were the days.

I miss the simplicity of the old MUDs. Even without the fancy colored GUIs.

I remember Netscape and AOL.... and for some reason AOL was the devils internet. haha I remember when AOL was basically the only search engine. And when Google came out, how silly I thought it was.
I also remember the amazing technology of phone line splicers!! No more getting kicked off when the phone was picked up. I also remember telling my mom to get a free email address with hotmail. She typed in hotmale and got mad at me.

haha and yes, the chat rooms. That was why AOL was the devil! I remember now! hahahahahahhahahahaha


Oh - don't forget the commercial - Yahoooooooooooo

Originally posted by davidgrouchy
Scripting my own Gopher search strings before there were search engines.

The day AOL destroyed the existing usenet community
where many actual scientists and leading professors would post
and watching them retreat as the trolls tipped the bus over with pr0n.

David Grouchy

Same here with Gopher though heavily used AIR MOSAIC after few years

In the early 80's I moonlighted in a basement data center connected to dozens of data centers around the world. It was really neat sending and receiving CMS messages with the other remote operators on those big green on black monitors. We call those IM's now. Someone needed a certain file loaded-- they just sent me a message and I would mount the tape or disk pack for the old equipment we still used.

Then I would go home and dial into a BBS, and was amazed the first time I saw "graphics"-- a novelty because they took too long to load. Periodically would buy a book with phone numbers for the various bulletin boards, but kept my own file of numbers. Meanwhile, word processing was done via WordStar.

The Internet crept into the world. First, I accessed it through a few bulletin boards that had access-- but no sooner had I written down the url's to try then everyone was dialed in and getting a connection was rare. Then it was feast followed by long periods of famine-- until the big ISP's showed up. I had an original IBM PC/XT with 20 MB about that time (BASIC programs I wrote of thousands of lines!). I remember having floppy disks with batch files to open to get me to various sites as well as bulletin boards-- dialing scripts.

Goodness, we manually entered the codes when we bought new devices-- the days before drivers. It was fun, took much time, but very satisfying ritual for having the latest and greatest peripheral.

Whatever ISP I first used (I think it was Compuserve), eventually I migrating to sprynet. For several months--maybe years( ?), many of us enjoyed the competition using up free service for a month or more and then switching to the next "Try Me!" disk (Prodigy, AOL, Juno, etc.). Links were often broken-- because website came and went so fast at the beginning. Most of the early sites as I recall were black background-- and way too colorful text.

Fighting trolls as a board moderator on boards that survived onto the Internet-- using sneaky software so we could tell who was using multiple ID's, and then (only when we had had enough of some trolls) using other sneaky software to post stuff all over in their name. The best was when I called one troll at his home to explain he was not nearly as anonymous as he thought!

As speeds increased, graphics, of course, became more common-- but so did utility programs to download. Not surprisingly, it was geek stuff I first saw-- Wow! A graphic program that can show the moon and planets for your location at any given time! Then there were games. We shared what we downloaded via floppy with one another-- because downloading "big" programs took so long. Next big change for me was the beginning of availability of scanned documents. I thought that was too good to last-- and downloaded tons which, of course, are still available for online viewing right where I first found them! I spent hours downloading documents and programs that take moments now.

Oh, and I was among those who didn't trust those newfangled online stores.

lol ... my first modem, 300 baud. No "AT" command set, wrote my own software to dial, as the software that came with the modem totally sucked. Dialing into a BBS and looking at the size of the software files. If it was larger than 20kB, it was too large to download, then you could order a floppy disk (360kB) with the software on it. E-mails worked via Fidonet, so sometimes took like in a week to get a reply from the other side of the world. Finally a local academic instance got a 64kb(!!!!) satellite link to Compuserve, and I subscribed to that service, shared between a couple of hundred users and universities, lol......

reply to post by Frankenchrist

403 errors never existed .

Frira and Hellhound, you just made me smile! 200 Baud modems and Fidonet.OMG we are OLD SCHOOL!
We had an Apple IIC+ on a home phone line that ran RedBaronsRoost BBS from 6pm till 6am every night. My friends father worked for McDonnell Douglas and thanks to him were able to use the "net" and talk to all kinds of teachers and scientists all over the US and Canada via Fido.
I remember getting into some trouble when we acquired a phone number for Monsanto and attempted to look at files,nothing major but the Parents were NOT amused!

Thanks for the memories

AOL trail disk and dial up.

reply to post by Frankenchrist


Beta testing the original Internet Explorer and having to configure it on my local ISPs system because nobody in their company knew how. Prior to that I remember programming in HTML using WordPerfect, lol.

i miss MUDs and MOOs and my ginormous world i built on BayMOO and allllll the verbs and objects i created (and hanging out at Davey Jones locker for HOURS reading the @exam < object number> of everything in there... i guess ya had to be there to get what i'm talking about.)

i miss my crappy geocities (and angelfire) homepage, built with the simplest HTML (using tables within tables within tables lol)--- and the closest thing to a "forum" was a guestbook (I had dreambook!).

webrings.

NO pop up ads.

being excited when you could FINALLY make a transparent .gif in paintshop pro, as opposed to having to make your graphics with the same background color as the page your were putting them on.

i think the very first computer we ever owned in my house was an ibm 3270 PC - no such thing as internet, though. and my sister would play with it every now and then, but i didn;t ant anything to do with it, i just didn't think it was as cool as my atari 2600

reply to post by xDeadcowx


Yes, and wasn't there a time @ 97/98 when nearly every site was in Times New Roman font?

I remember b/w. LCD Wap mobile internet on horrible tiny screens too.

Ahhh the modem noise, and long extension cables for the phone/modem strewn everywhere before WiFi, or even getting a cat 5e cable outlet to my pc. Running a cable upstairs then packing it away EVERY evening, so others could use the phone and not trip on it...

Attachment heavy (photos, pdfs...) e-mail or downloads (security updates) crashing the pc/connection after like 45 minutes , or hours, and taking several attempts, perhaps days...to sort out. You had a lot of time to do other things!

Really bad examples of website design, when useability and protocols were still being refined ...

[Zip discs - wow you can get over 100 Mb on a disc - cool, 1.44 Mb floppys are so yesterday! Haha!]

Originally posted by dreamingawake
Ah,
The sound of dial up when it finally stooped and connected. Warez without the threat of being found. Not having to wade through the "ad sites" that now replace the results in searching. Various chatrooms(a/s/l checks every few mins ), as social networking. Not having to type in a security code or home phone/cell to post somewhere/access e-mail.

via '96/'97+

BBS pre that time that family had introduced me to.

edit on 1-8-2011 by dreamingawake because: (no reason given)

Hahahaha a/s/l checks!! I remember when I first saw that, over at a friends house who had AOL, I had no idea what it meant and someone typed it out for me. We had Erol's internet at my house, spent hours on Sk8Chat, built my own Angelfire webpage, first Hotmail address, being able to search for anything and get a legit find, getting caught by my parents for looking up adult videos because I had no idea that there was a such thing as a 'history' on the browser... Ahh the old days of the internet.

Crazy to think that the kids born nowadays won't be able to phathom not having an internet... We used to ride bikes, play in the woods, and drink from the hose when I was a kid.. And I'm only 28!

that i should have bought google stock.

Exclusivity and control are two descriptors. Older members will call to mind a snide little phrase used by digital elitists back in the day to describe persons with no access to the internet: "persons of no address" (referring to lack of e-mail, young 'uns).

But there was that little phrase Artificial Intelligence and the whole concept of self-developing and self-sustaining neural networks that would eventually render that problematic group irrelevant. Hal grew up and took us with him.

www.techeye.net...

I remember on the old internet, this site was a black page, with white and red text on it. So long ago, the 90's to boot. It's crazy when you think that things went from all text to what they are now.

One thing I remember well though, is the old school BBS systems...and how much I hated them.

Fujitsu PC was our 1st computer, windows 3.11, 4mb hard drive, multimedia PC with CD ROM

haha I just thought then, il do a search for it. And up it came!!! My 1st PC ---> Fujitsu-ICL PCTV

No internet when we had this though, we got a 'Time' PC a few years later, 1st memories of internet are playing MS FlightSim 98 online and getting moaned at by people who could actually fly. Most annoying thing was getting cut off after 60 minutes every hour.

Remember being in awe when my teacher told us the school was getting an ISDN line in that would run at 128k and we would be able to video chat with schools round the world (which I dont think they ever actually did )

Our first computer was a $200 Sinclair my parents bought for Christmas one year. My cousin and I wrote a dating program for it but it ran out of memory after something like 25 lines of code. Then Dad got a TRS80 model III. I loved playing Zork and Dancing Demon, which had to be loaded from cassette tapes. I remember going to Radio Shack and looking at games, all in cassette tapes in plastic bags that hung on the wall. My rich friend Wendy had an Apple 2E, and we spent many hours playing Space Invaders in Jr High. After I grew up and had my first baby, I went back to school for my degree and that's when I finally got my first PC. I don't remember the model - it was a 385 clone with a Word-like program I could write my papers on. I still had that PC when I discovered our local BBS (dial-up modem, of course) and I was instantly addicted. It was so small that we used to have BBS parties where we would get together at people's houses and I met a bunch of the people I hungout with on-line. I was sad when my BBS got swallowed up into a real chat-room and the local parties ended. My ex was into POV-Ray (ray-tracing program) and we used to marvel at the cool images people would render for their monthly contests on line.

LOL - here is the Sinclair - have a good laugh!

Napster!!

reply to post by Frankenchrist


... and the original BYTE magazine, when it was still full of hardware ideas and circuit diagrams, not the crappy Byte of later years when ZD took it over and it became just a marketing magazine. Then there was Microcornucopia ran by a bunch of hippies, not as thick as BYTE, but with a good idea in every mag.

I remember using my computer to calculate Mandelbrot sets, and would run for a couple of days to calculate the basic set at 800x600 (???) monochrome resolution, and then I got hold of a Transputer, and that brought the calculation of the set down to about 7 hours!!!!

And I remember the Rogue-game on the UNIX-machines, and Colossal Cave adventure played on an IBM 370 mainframe . Will always remember the keywords in that game, Plugh, Plover, Fee Foe Fie Foo, Y2 and so on.

Found this link to a 1983 copy of Microcornucopia :
www.flickr.com...